AMD Asks What You'd Do With 48 Cores; Offers Chance To Win Some

We've already covered AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours processor and associated Maranello server platform in some detail, but AMD is apparently wanting to build some buzz around its new hardware. Over at his AMD blog, AMD's director of product marketing John Fruehe recently spilled the beans on a 48-core contest.

The AMD Server team is kicking March off with a new contest. We are seeking your best essays, videos, or blog posts documenting how you might use 48 cores...Tell us what you can do with 48 cores to make the world a better, more interesting place, delivering the top performance or optimizing power. Of course creativity will be awarded, so don’t be afraid to show the fun side of servers...Here’s a tip: playing World of Warcraft faster than anyone is probably not going to get you the good stuff. Think about what you can do to help society, to help others. That will give you an edge.

AMD is giving away four AMD 6174 processors (12 cores each, 2.2GHz operating speed), one Tyan S8812 motherboard featuring four processor sockets and eight DIMMs per socket, and one copy of Windows Server 2008. Total value of the prize package is estimated at $8,189. AMD isn't including any RAM, which is rather unfortunate when you stop to think about the cost of loading even four DIMMs per socket to utilize all four memory channels. RAM would add somewhere between $600-$1200 (at least), but we doubt the winner will quibble over the lack of free memory.


We can't help but be curious—whether you choose to enter the contest or not, what would you do with 48 processor cores on a single board besides heat half the house? In this case you're allowed to answer "play World of Warcraft faster than anyone else, but since WoW doesn't scale across 48 cores and that motherboard may or may not have a full x16 PCIe slot, we'd suggest looking elsewhere for inspiration.